Bad to Think With: Plants and Property Relations
2026-04-28 16:00 - 17:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
Presented by Veit Braun.
Animals, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said, are not just good to eat but good to think with: they elucidate the structure of social relations. But what about plants? In this talk I argue that the ways we relate to plants on the one hand and the matrix of people and things on the other offered by property thought are a bad match. Much of what plants are and do does not neatly fit into the categories of subject and object or body and idea; nor can the problems caused by intellectual and tangible property in plants easily be addressed by the critique of property. To elaborate this point, I want to sketch the trajectories on which plants go astray and slip through our matrices of property (including my own) by exploring some of what has happened in the legal landscape of especially European plant breeding over the last 20 or so years. Whether we should run after plants and leave property behind or, conversely, try to patch up the structure of property relations depends on what we care about more: saving plants or saving property.

Biography
Veit Braun is a sociologist and Research Associate at the University of Augsburg, Germany. His work is situated at the intersection of law, economics and biology. Veit has studied the contemporary crises of property in plant breeding and the organisational and temporal logics of animal biobanks. He is currently leading the research project ‘More and Less’ on the mutable identity of nitrogen in society. His book At the End of Property: Patents, Plants and the Crisis of Propertization was published by Bristol University Press in 2024.

About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series
The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.
Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.
This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.

Plant Success Research Retreat 2026
2026-06-22 - 2026-06-26
The sixth annual Plant Success Research Retreat will occur in the week beginning 22 June 2026. The retreat is open to all Centre Members to attend in person and virtual attendance will also be available.
More details to come.

Winter School in AI and Predictive Agriculture
2026-07-13 08:00 - 2026-07-15 17:00
The Winter School in AI and Predictive Agriculture is a free event to share the collective learnings of experts from The University of Queensland in the use of AI and predictive analytics in Agriculture and Sustainability. The event will be held on 13-15 July 2026 at The University of Queensland St Lucia Campus, Brisbane and will feature seminars, case studies and hands-on workshops.
The Winter School aims to:

Build capacity in applied AI for agriculture, especially amongst PhD students, EMCRs and industry participants;
Provide participants with practical skills, not just knowledge;
Demonstrate AI as an enabler to make standard agricultural technologies more accessible.

A high level agenda is below, you can submit an expression of interest to attend one or more of the events:

Monday 13 July: AI Toolkit and Foundations
All day: Lecture, online or in person. Morning tea and lunch will be provided for in person attendees.
Attendees will learn the foundations of AI in an accessible way to support the applied case studies and hands‑on workshops in the following days. Topics will include:

Intro to Neural Networks
AI Models and Embeddings
Transformers and LLMs
Agentic AI
AI tools deployment

Tuesday 14 July: Phenotyping
AM: Lecture, online or in person. Morning tea will be provided for in person attendees.
Attendees will explore how the AI Toolkit can be applied to advanced predictive phenotyping through expert seminars and real-world case studies. Topics will include:

Sensors and point clouds
Machine learning for phenotyping
Foundation models for crops
High throughput platforms and 3D digital twins
UAV image data processing

PM: Hands-on workshop, in person only (spaces limited). Lunch will be provided.
Participants will apply the methods introduced on real-world problems.

Wednesday 15 July: Genomic prediction
AM: Lecture, online or in person. Morning tea will be provided for in person attendees.
Attendees will learn how AI methods can be leveraged for genomic prediction via expert seminars and applied case studies. Topics will include:

Fundamentals of Genotype-to-Phenotype models
Ensemble models
Graph Neural Networks applied to genomic prediction
Marker selection using biological priors and networks
Agentic coding to build a genomic prediction pipeline

PM: Hands-on workshop, in person only (spaces limited). Lunch will be provided.
Participants will apply the methods introduced on real-world problems.
Spaces for hands-on workshops are strictly limited.
We are currently seeking expressions of interest for this event, please complete the EOI form here if you would like to participate >
Scientific and Technical Committee
David Kainer
Senior Research Fellow, The University of Queensland, ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success
Genomic prediction and graphs.

Alex Wu
Senior Research Fellow, Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation
Field-level design/prediction, optimisation and machine learning with crop models to explore G×E×M interactions and design optimal crop ideotypes.
Liqi Han
Research Fellow, Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation
Crop Digital Twins, High Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence, High Throughput Phenotyping.

Brodie Lawson
Postdoctoral Researcher, Queensland University of Technology, ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success
Crop growth modelling across scales, including plant signalling, cell-growth and physiology. Gaussian process regression as a surrogate to true modelling to create fast models for crop simulators.

Christos Mitsanis
PhD Student, The University of Queensland, ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success
Agentic AI, mechanistic networks and CGMs.

Sophie (Qiaomin) Chen
Research Fellow, The University of Queensland
Multi-scale precision agriculture. Integrates crop modelling with machine learning. modelling of crop traits using simulation-generated data sets.

Sebastian Lopez-Marcano
Senior Manager Analytics, The University of Queensland
Data analytics, workflows.

Javier Fernandez
Research Fellow, The University of Queensland
Crop and agronomic modelling.

Eric Dinglasan
Senior Research Fellow, Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation
Optimisation strategies for QTL stacking models. Adapts methods proven in animal breeding to crops.

Genotype by Environment by Management (GxExM) Symposium IV
2026-11-05 - 2026-11-06
Event information
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success is coordinating the next Genotype by Environment by Management (GxExM) symposium in November 2026 in Brisbane, Queensland. The symposium will focus on a range of topics related to the study of GxExM interactions and their importance for crop improvement.
The symposium will be conducted to stimulate new approaches, building on a foundation of sharing understanding and insights from case studies, leading to discussion of ideas that will advance experimental, modelling and prediction methods to enhance crop improvement strategies.
The presentations and discussions during the symposium will be recorded (whenever permission is granted) and made available online, to improve accessibility for all participants. If you have any questions about the format of the meeting or your potential for involvement, please contact plantsuccess@uq.edu.au.
Expressions of interest have closed. The event will be held on Thursday 5 and Friday 6 November 2026 in Australia, more information and registration instructions will be circulated soon.
GxExM Background
The potential importance of GxExM interactions has been considered for many performance properties of agricultural systems. There are complex and growing pressures acting upon the global crop systems on which we depend for our livelihoods.
Universally, significant yield gaps have been identified between potential and realised on-farm crop productivity for most crop systems. Further, the sustainability of the current and required levels of crop productivity to meet the expectations of future needs are continually questioned.
The challenges are diverse, complex and multi-faceted. Crop breeders seek to utilise available genetic resources to develop improved cultivars.
Crop agronomists seek to define agronomic management practices that will work for the improved cultivars.
Farmers seek to combine the improved cultivars with appropriate agronomic practices to achieve a target on-farm productivity while balancing short and long-term risks and rewards.
There have been and continue to be many calls for integrated efforts.
There are successful examples of integrated efforts between breeders, agronomists in partnership with farmers. A number of such efforts have emphasised the importance of considering the potential influences of GxExM interactions at multiple levels within the crop systems.
